Addiction can affect anyone, at any age and in any social class. It is indiscriminate.

 

It has been said that more people die from addiction or addiction-related behaviour than anything else in the modern world. Addiction has hit epidemic proportions. There are many ways of describing addiction. My preferred description is that it is a loss of choice. Often when we think of addiction, we think about drink or drugs. However, we can get addicted to almost anything.

 

The difference between engaging in an activity that you enjoy and love, and being addicted, is that you have lost the ability to choose… once you start, you can't stop, even if you want to. It may get to the point that you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, but you just can't stop. One person described addiction to me this way - "It was fun, it was then fun with problems, then it was just problems"

 

Addiction can affect so much around you. You may experience difficulties at home, or missed days from work in order to indulge in your addiction.

 

You may need to ask yourself whether you have a healthy enthusiasm toward your activity or whether it is an addiction. The difference is that the healthy enthusiasm will improve the quality and benefit to your life, but addiction with just take that away.  

 

What are the consequences to your behaviour? Is it negatively affecting you or the people around you?

 

NLP can offer one of many ways of helping you through this. We may need to look at the patterns that you have formed around your addiction and what purpose they serve. When we discover this, we can help you to change these. With NLP we believe that every
behaviour has a positive intention... were your intentions to protect yourself or to help you to deal with some difficulties? Once we have unpacked this we can consider the choices you have in order to think about and develop more constructive or helpful ways of dealing with the same issue.